I have to have insurance now, even though a lot of the functions of my car are controlled by their software.
Remember when the Toyota had that problem of the accelerator "getting stuck" because the software didn't disengage? Initially the owners' insurances were paying out, until it happened enough that they were able to prove it was Toyota's fault, and then Toyota had to pay them back.
I imagine in a self driving world it would work the same way. You get insurance, the car has a crash, your insurance and the manufacturer fight out whose fault it is.
Sometimes it seems that critics of something like self-driving cars want so badly for the project to fail that they themselves fail to see obvious solutions.
The insurance will work much better than it does today, because insurance in it's core is about spreading the risks and calculating exact costs of those risks, it's about calculating statistics of negative events and predicting total costs of such events for the entire fleets.
ALL parts of that equation are just better calculated if all cars were automatic, - you can better calculate number of accidents, you can see details of all accidents because there is blackbox data including videos, you can compare cars to each other because a Tesla with same hardware drives in exactly the same way as another one (which cannot be said for human drivers), they don't have to calculate for weird human risk activities such as drinking or being tired, they can run simulations of the same situation on the same software etc. etc.
Insurance is not going to have any problems, insurance is going to love it and make a lot of money on the self-driving cars, they are a perfect fit for each other. Insurance companies don't even care for whom do they have to pay to, they just care that the statistic of the number of failures is correctly represented and that manufacturers don't lie about those statistics - that is all they care about, they calculate a simple equation, that's all insurance is about...
Insurers like standards and features that can be easily verified and improve predictability of the crowd. The issue with high tech solutions, especially mono-cultures is malicious hacking or outages of central services that result in simultaneous failure. An insurer can't handle 50% of cars crashing in the same year.
Insurance would be a nightmare for a manufacturer. Every accident will initially be pegged to the auto maker (as it should be.. it’s their code!). The auto maker will always try to weasel out and blame the passenger-owners of the car (they didn’t maintain it, the paint was dirty and messed with the sensors, the tire pressure was 2 PSI lower than average).
And if you go with the “nobody will own cars, you’ll just summon one” model... well the fleet owner will just sue the manufacturer instead.
Just like Tesla blames dead drivers for using "autopilot." "They should have kept their hands on the wheel and been paying attention." No you can't have a copy of the data.
Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability)
For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.
>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,
Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?
Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)
Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.
However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)
But all of those cars are insured (and that insurance is underwritten) today. So the liability already lives on the balance sheet of insurance companies. Maybe the specific companies change...
eh, right now most people are massively underinsured; minimum coverage in California is like $35k, and most insurance companies won't sell you a plan with more than a half million of liability (at least not without an umbrella policy) - if we stop subsidizing driving through pushing costs on to victims of accidents, the cost of driving will go up. But yeah, it should be about the cost of a good umbrella policy+auto policy is now, modulo any savings if the self-driving car gets in fewer accidents.
but note, we're paying most of that already in the form of people who are killed and under-compensated by under-insured drivers. Increasing liability insurance minimums would roll that cost that is currently born entirely by the victim into the cost of operating a car, which is where it ought to be.
Remember when the Toyota had that problem of the accelerator "getting stuck" because the software didn't disengage? Initially the owners' insurances were paying out, until it happened enough that they were able to prove it was Toyota's fault, and then Toyota had to pay them back.
I imagine in a self driving world it would work the same way. You get insurance, the car has a crash, your insurance and the manufacturer fight out whose fault it is.